Bugs and Suggestions

Ranking History

It would be really neat if we could see the ranking history for each mud on the listing. To be more clear, if there were a page which we could see how many total votes a given mud received each month for the past year.

It would be really neat if we could see the ranking history for each mud on the listing. To be more clear, if there were a page which we could see how many total votes a given mud received each month for the past year.

Interesting thought, but might I ask why? Would a year ago ranking number give you a reason to try something? Or not try something?

Personally, despite the ranking of NWA, I feel you should try the game you find exciting based on the layout and feel and description not based on what other players think.

And, as I always do, I recommend this link if you are seriously searching for a good game to play:

Except their terribly inaccurate for Wotmud.org, as we have a 3-sided race war, each with it's own who list.

The reason I'm interested in this is for tracking purposes regarding how many votes the mud I play has received each month over time. Whether they've gone up or down. Mostly a curiosity thing, but possibly using it to compare to our average monthly players, it could be useful to help convince non-voters that voting does indeed make a difference in gaining new players. I could do this manually or with a script, but it would be nice if I didn't have to.

I'd be interested to see if the Voting process is done fairly, or by players voting through their alts from different machines (Library Computers, Workstations or through a friend/family computer)

Darren Brimhall

This has always bothered me too. How does a game with 20 average players have enough votes to be in the Top Ten here? We all know everyone doesn't vote everyday on any game, yet here is Avatar Mud with over 1300 votes and Isles of Aedin which is supposedly in BETA with over 900? Anyone else think someone is cheating to get their game noticed?

Accusations of cheating without facts bother me. When quoting numbers, you have to understand what they mean. I am one person. I can vote 2x daily. I have 2 votes per day for any given mud. Over the course of 24 days, I can personally generate 48 votes. Over the same time period, 20 dedicated persons can easily generate 960 votes. Do the math. Total votes divided by 2, which quotient is then divided by the number of days passed in the voting period.

Accusations of cheating without hard evidence in this circumstance don't bother me in the least. Alter Aeon has a solid 50 person playerbase, and a great percentage of them are extremely dedicated. Getting them to build thousand rooms areas? Sure, no problem. Getting them to vote every day, day in and out, even when provided timers and tools to track it? Almost impossible.

That's not to say that real, dedicated voters don't exist, or that they don't have an impact. However, I have virtually no doubt that the games with grossly high hit counts for their size have those hit counts because one or two dedicated individuals has access to a remote server farm for automated voting. It's not like it's rocket science.

Accusations of cheating without hard evidence in this circumstance don't bother me in the least. Alter Aeon has a solid 50 person playerbase, and a great percentage of them are extremely dedicated. Getting them to build thousand rooms areas? Sure, no problem. Getting them to vote every day, day in and out, even when provided timers and tools to track it? Almost impossible.

In the long-term, sure - Alter Aeon has been around since 1995 after all. But Isles of Aedin is barely six months old, the players probably haven't been burnt out by all the voting yet.

This has always bothered me too. How does a game with 20 average players have enough votes to be in the Top Ten here? We all know everyone doesn't vote everyday on any game, yet here is Avatar Mud with over 1300 votes and Isles of Aedin which is supposedly in BETA with over 900? Anyone else think someone is cheating to get their game noticed?

Here's a possibility, though unproven--and I say that to be fair and not as an assertion of what's occuring. And an even more simplar one following this.

The MUD in question can be played on a wide varriety of systems (IE, Firefox, Safari, Netscape(which is Firefox nowadays), and can allow for the creation of up to six characters (Alts) and Accounts.

(side stepping)
I myself have actually carried three other players on my Credit Card at Marrach without trouble. So name doesn't matter, only account number of the card. Plus, there is an option for month and yearly pay by check or money order. So addidtional accounts can be made using different cards, or by Mailed in payments.
However, the first month of an account is free. So technically one can concieveably create numerious limited time accounts under numerious names and addresses.

(back to possibility)
Now, since the IP address of the computer is already known by the Voting site, would it be then possible for the player to use another computer (or blackberry like device) to relog and vote again. Or, as I have come to learn, utilize a program that alters their computer's original IP Address, which can fool the Voting site and allow another vote (or many from the same person).

Other possibilities can be Voter Apathy, where they just don't bother voting, or Players of other Games can access TMS.com by other means.

Again, I say that the first Possibility is yet to be proveable either in theory or fact.

This thread has gone way off topic. Perhaps a mod can move all the posts from Ajanas's on to a new thread in Tavern of the Blue Hand, or perhaps even add them to the 2-year-old thread "Let's Talk about Voting - Shall we?"? Incidentally, this old thread was also started with accusations of several muds cheating by Ajanas, only one of which actually panned out.

This thread has gone way off topic. Perhaps a mod can move all the posts from Ajanas's on to a new thread in Tavern of the Blue Hand, or perhaps even add them to the 2-year-old thread "Let's Talk about Voting - Shall we?"? Incidentally, this old thread was also started with accusations of several muds cheating by Ajanas, only one of which actually panned out.

Isles of Aedin (of which I have an account) had a whopping 14 players on yesterday as I watched them vote 100 times to keep them in 3rd place on the top page. Give me a break. You can excuse them all you want, but let's call a spade a spade. Even if every player voted every 12 hours (we know that doesn't happen) they would need to all vote from 4 different IP's, because they had the 100 votes within 24 hours.

Not to defend cheating, but be really sure of your allegations. I'm not really pro or anti Isles of Aedin, but I'll often vote for a mud even when I'm not online. TMS is set up to receive and calculate votes the way it does. Every mud is in the same boat. So take the voting results with a grain of salt. They're not a measure of how good your mud is. They're a measure of how many unique IP addresses within a specified time increment over a specified length of time clicked on a voting link. People aren't rushing out the door to try Isles of Aedin or any mud based on the TMS ranking, expecting awesomeness because it was ranked #3. Pretty much every mud on the first page gets plenty of hits, and most people around here try muds due to word of mouth.

First time posting, so first a small introduction. I am the coder behind the game "Isles of Aedin". I've been playing MUDs for... well, an embarrassingly long time and have voted on this site among others for numerous games while being a player. Aedin is my first venture into the realm of MUD design and running. Plenty of ups and downs, mistakes learned, etc. but it's a fun hobby and we have a great little community going. Is it perfect? Not even close. Are we going to compete against the likes of Achaea and Aardwolf? Probably not. Are we having fun? Heck yeah!

Anyway, I signed up to post here because someone directed me to this thread where we are apparently facing allegations of misconduct. I thought I'd drop in here for a couple of reasons.

1.) Hello! It's good to be a part of the gaming community. I have lurked around here for a while and have enjoyed the friendly atmosphere and general sense of help. When people can recommend game A even while working on game B, it shows a solid amount of maturity.

2.) To the best of my knowledge, nobody on IoA is cheating on the votes. I have made posts a couple of times making sure people know that voting through proxy is illegal. If TMS admins determine that some of our votes are coming from proxies, I would sincerely urge them to remove those votes from the count. If there are particular suspicions, I would be more than happy to help investigate them to make sure that everything is on the level. We're a small game being run entirely as a hobby just for the love of MUDing and have nothing really to gain by cheating our way to the top.

3.) In terms of number of votes, right now there are 41 players on IoA, excluding staff while I am typing this. An interesting point to consider is that there is also no multiplaying which inflates the size of some games' who list (not that there's anything wrong with that, just important to note in this metric). That's above average, but 30 isn't unheard of. We also have a number of people that vote rather fervently, though I suspect that this won't always be the case.

What I would like, however, is to see some clarification on voting from different locations. My take on it is that it is against the spirit of the rules, though not the letter. I would be naive to believe that nobody is voting from smart phones as well as their computer, as well as probably voting from work as well as home. If I have missed this somewhere in the rules please direct me and I will be sure to pass it along to our players as well. In the interim I have essentially told them the same thing and asked them to keep the voting on the level.